Even from the cover of the first volume, it’s clear that The Promised Neverland isn’t your standard Shonen Jump property. The base art style favors delicate, almost wobbly linework and evocative scribbles over the bold splashes of black and white favored by, say, My Hero Academia or Bleach. The cover is confident in this fraying delicacy, happy to let a clearly defined spiraling staircase fade into half-imagined detail, and in doing so evoking the visual style of something like a children’s picture book. This doesn’t feel like the steady work of a Jump veteran; this feels like the first manga of a dedicated illustrator, perfectly suiting its fairy tale storytelling.

There’s also the actual, physical content of that cover, neatly expressing the duality of Neverland’s narrative. Our heroine Emma is central and reaching towards us, smiling, offering no implication of a clear conflict or goal. Flanked by her friends, the world around her trails upward to make a circle of warm blue sky and idyllic pastures, the clear context for her happy smile. But below, these sunny images are propped up by winding staircases that ultimately spiral into an abyss, the foundation of Emma’s certainty a yawning black hole. The contrast between Emma’s nature and the substance of her world, the fragility and mystery of this place, is thus made clear even before the first chapter.

That contrast is further illustrated through the manga’s first few pages, as Emma gaily describes her daily life at an orphanage known as Grace Field House. Emma’s life is easy and joyous here – though she and her fellow orphans have to take daily tests, she’s actually one of the best at them, and aside from that, they mostly spend their time playing in the fields and being showered with affection by “Mom,” their caretaker. And when they grow up, they have the enticing mystery of the outside world awaiting them – after all, here at Grace Field House, every single child is adopted before they turn twelve.

While Emma herself has no reason to question the happiness of her reality, we in the audience are given stark and thematically charged details undercutting this world from moment one. First off, there’s the fact that Emma and all her friends are literally coded with numbers printed on their body, as stark a “you are an object, not a person” image you can get without even getting into that choice’s historical baggage. And then there’s those daily tests, continuously measuring the students’ scholastic aptitude for no clear purpose. There’s obviously something sinister going on here, but as pages add up, we mostly just enjoy time with Emma and her friends at their beloved orphanage. Things remain upbeat and light until it’s Connie’s time to leave, and the first chapter ends on the most horrifying possible reveal.

Yes, as it turns out, the children of Grace Field House are essentially being raised as cattle, to eventually be fed to monsters they don’t even know exist. As a base narrative hook, this is a classic but perpetually sturdy conceit, naturally leading The Promised Neverland to a sort of mindgame-focused prison break narrative that really stands out from the Shonen Jump pack. And in thematic terms, I’d say this premise makes Neverland the most furious and politically charged children’s manga I’ve read in a long, long time.

The inclusion of familiar, standardized tests as a metric of judging the “food quality” of these children essentially feels like the key giveaway here, but the entirety of this first chapter is constructed to set up an inherent anger against the world as it really does exist. While the rest of Neverland’s world evokes an anachronistic, early-twentieth-century estate (likely in order to further emphasize the story’s fairy tale tone), the tests they take rely on modern equipment and ask modern questions, directly evoking our own public education system. Taken as a whole, Grace Field House makes for an easy enough metaphor for pre-professional life – charming adventures with friends, rigorous scholastic evaluation, and the promise that when you graduate, the world outside will support you as you chase your dreams.

Of course, this doesn’t happen, either in the real world or in Neverland. We graduate into a world where merit, effort, and result are wholly disconnected, and where the winners and losers have largely already been decided. We graduate into aging populations that ask the world of us while promising nothing, into systems that have already hardened into structural oppression, and into industries that see us as resources to be expended and discarded. We graduate into the gig economy. We graduate and learn, as Emma and her friends do, that we are no more and no less than “high quality meat for the rich.” Though it’d be easy to assume that the titular “Promised Neverland” is Grace Field House, where children never grow old, it seems to me that the title actually refers to the adult world – to the bright future we’re promised, never to be realized.

As if this hyper-thematically-charged narrative weren’t enough, The Promised Neverland goes further, and uses the contrast between Emma and her peers to articulate its resounding humanism in the face of this brutal reality. Neverland takes care to underline that Emma, Ray, and Norman, our three leads, are genuinely just much more impressive achievers than their peers. They get the best test scores, they win during their playful contests, and they exhibit a degree of tactical thinking and speedy learning that sets them significantly apart. As we eventually learn, it’s only the tremendous quality of their meat that’s kept them alive this long, affording them the time to ripen like wine.

Emma and her companions’ competency is important to this narrative on two levels. First, on an immediate dramatic level, Emma, Ray, and Norman’s ability to learn and plot is basically their “weapon.” While most Shonen Jump properties equip their leads with actual weapons, Neverland isn’t an action manga – it’s more of a prison break pot boiler, where the excitement comes from the plays and counterplays of Emma’s group and their prison warden. And the manga certainly succeeds as a pot boiler – there’s a natural progression of sub-conflicts within their planned escape, and standout panels draw just as much impact from concepts like “oh crap, she knows” as other manga might from a big punch. Just look at how Emma’s caretaker engulfs her visually in this panel, perfectly setting the stage for a David and Goliath-style interrogation scene.

But on a thematic level, Emma and her friends’ competency is important for a very different reason. There is no doubt that Emma, Ray and Norman are “better” than their playmates, at least judging by the qualities this world values. They are stronger, smarter, quicker to adapt. They were born with great intrinsic qualities, and that’s precisely what a place like Grace Field House is designed to discover. And indeed, their profound ingrained abilities mean they very well could possess the conviction and intelligence to escape this place – at least if they were alone. But when both Norman and Ray raise the idea of escaping alone, first out of fear and then out of pragmatic necessity, Emma refuses. She doesn’t want to see another of her siblings die. She doesn’t care how that changes their odds.

Emma’s refusal seems to strike at the heart of Promised Neverland, and reveal where its own loyalties lie. In a world that echoes our own too closely for comfort, and which consistently emphasizes the importance of scholastic achievement and the ranking of human value, Emma stands as the resolute humanist. It doesn’t matter that the little kids are weak and ignorant, and could very well slow them down. Their lives are equally valid, their stories are equally deserving of happy endings, and Emma refuses to leave them behind. Though Connie’s death is this volume’s great dramatic trick, I feel her hopeful goodbye represents Neverland’s true heart. This girl who was never that strong and never that smart, but who nonetheless had a big dream in her head and a happy, charitable life ahead of her. This girl who deserved better, in spite of failing according to every metric this society values. Neverland’s sympathy for this girl, and its fury at the world that wronged her, is palpable. Neverland’s art is wonderful and its storytelling is thrilling, but I hope it never lets go of that righteous fury.

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